Why Porsche Added an Illusion to Its New $111,900 Electric Vehicle

Porsche’s newest Taycan uses fancy engineering to simulate something that technology killed.

Pull the left paddle on the new Porsche Taycan‘s steering wheel, and the car will jolt. That jolt is deliberate. Porsche’s engineers built it to feel like a downshift in a car that has no gears to change.

The system is called E-Shift, and it arrives with the 2027 model year Taycan, which like all Taycans is an EV. It gives the car eight virtual gears, a rev counter with a shift light, simulated engine braking, and a rev limiter that flares if a driver holds a gear too long. A reworked Electric Sport Sound rises and falls with load and speed to finish the illusion.

Electric motors deliver smooth, instant torque from a standstill, which is........

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